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Techdirt (techdirt.com) is a technology news and opinion website covering digital rights, internet policy, consumer protection, and free speech issues.
A federal judge in Arizona found Assistant US Attorney Brooks Chupp violated Rule 11 with an accusation that had no evidence, Techdirt reported. Techdirt calls the sanction a wrist slap in a field where, it says, judges have mostly threatened penalties for ICE and DOJ lawyers.
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Protesters suing DHS in Maine allege the agency stored photos and license plate numbers of ICE observers in a database Palantir built. Techdirt says the filing contradicts ICE's denials, but their wording is narrow enough that both can be true.
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TikTok's $100 million Alabama settlement over 'addictive' features commits it to as much as $183.8 million more if other state attorneys general follow. For product teams, teen design rules now arrive one state deal at a time, with a payout tied to the next one.
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Police need a warrant to search Flock Safety's plate database, which Techdirt says takes in 20 billion images a month, a federal court has ruled. The decision binds no other court, but lawyers fighting plate-reader searches elsewhere can now cite it.
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xAI won a one-line Eighth Circuit order pausing Minnesota's nudify-app law and its fines of up to $500,000 per use. The court did not explain itself, so the case that the law's flat drafting dooms it remains Techdirt's argument, untested by any judge.
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Apple is fighting at the Fourth Circuit to move West Virginia's suit over its CSAM filtering into federal court under 28 U.S.C. Section 1442(a)(1). The court that hears it will be the first to rule on whether a state can use liability to dictate how a platform searches its users' content.
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Warner/Chappell's claim on a few seconds of a friend's karaoke took Lindsay Ellis's two-and-a-half-hour cruise video off YouTube, Ellis says. Any team shipping long-form video now has to count stray background music as a risk to the whole upload.
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Bricks & Minifigs sued the anonymous operators of The BAM Map after filing two copyright takedowns over internal documents the site published. Its complaint swaps copyright for trade-secret and contract claims that point at someone inside BAM's own franchise network.
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Flock Safety told Sen. Josh Hawley that plate searches will need a case number by year-end, on a network that scans about 20 billion plates a month. Because an emergency bypass is built in, whether the rule curbs misuse depends on agencies reading their own search logs.
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EU Commission's draft Kids Act bars social media accounts for under-13s and locks the unrestricted version of covered apps behind an age check. Techdirt argues platforms will play it safe and check everyone, so adults carry the privacy cost too.
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Officials told Bloomberg some Centcom staff relied too much on Palantir's Maven AI before a US strike killed more than 165 at an Iranian girls' school. The reported failure is users trusting a fused screen too far. Builders of AI decision support have to design for that risk.
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OpenAI and Microsoft accuse Susman Godfrey, the plaintiffs' firm in the consolidated AI copyright suit, of paying for research and hiding the payment. At stake is the kind of market-dilution evidence a federal judge said last year that authors suing Meta had not presented.
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Techdirt reports that the deal embeds age gating across Meta's products and puts under-18 accounts on a daily clock with default content filters, and says TikTok and YouTube will be pressed to match it.
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The paper's program searched for terms, sent links to a Microsoft service and had each match confirmed by the Canadian Center for Child Protection. X told critics last year that its own detection technology was better.
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Trump posted the ban on Friday, and by Saturday morning CNN, MS NOW and Politico reporters were being turned away from the White House grounds. Politico says the Secret Service kept its reporter's pass.
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The twelve attorneys general leave with two promises they will have to police themselves, and Free Press says parts of the deal ask less of Paramount than the two companies already do separately.
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Homeland Security Investigations used a self-issued customs subpoena to ask an outdoor retailer who bought one hat in one metro area since 2024. Every product team that keeps order history by default has a retention window it may have to defend.
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The debate over AI risk has centred on models that rewrite their own code. Anthropic's latest misuse report spends 154 pages on nine months of intrusions and surveillance that have already happened.
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EFF pulled Flock Safety's plate-reader search logs through public records requests and found 'LOL', 'LMAO' and 'sexy' entered as justifications. Flock says a dropdown of crimes improved the system.
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Game Pass tiers will include 5, 10 or 15 cloud gaming hours a month when the limits land in November, with extra hours for sale. Microsoft says rising costs drove the change and that 4% of subscribers are affected.
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Product · August 17, 2026 · Confirmed2 publishers